War of Words: Taylor Disputes Bernanke’s Description of Interest-Rate Rule

Stanford University professor John Taylor, an outspoken critic of the Federal Reserve in recent years, has a new complaint: He says Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is misrepresenting Mr. Taylor’s eponymous rule on interest rates.

Reuters

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke

The Taylor Rule offers a simple formula that economists often use as a guide for the appropriate level of the federal funds rate. The formula provides changes in interest rates depending on the level of inflation and the output gap, which is the difference between actual gross domestic product and the economy’s potential output. Depending on how you define the rule (for instance if you give the output gap a lot of weight in the formula or just a little, or if you use a projected inflation rate or actual inflation) you can come up with different interpretations of whether interest rates should be high, low or even negative in a theoretical world.

Mr. Bernanke said Tuesday that the Taylor Rule suggested that short-term interest rates, if they could be, should be pushed way below zero. That, in turn, helped to justify the Fed’s $600 billion bond-buying program, he said.

When Sen. Pat Toomey, Republican from Pennsylvania, challenged him on whether Mr. Taylor himself believed that, Mr. Bernanke asserted even Mr. Taylor has come up with variations of his own rule. The one he originally formulated in 1993 doesn’t support the Fed’s current policy, but Taylor’s revision to it in 1999 does support the Fed’s current policy, Mr. Bernanke said.

“There’s no particular reason to pick the one that he picked in 1993. In fact, he preferred a different one in 1999 which, if you use that one, gives you a much different answer,” Mr. Bernanke said in an exchange Tuesday with Sen. Toomey.

Taylor’s 1999 paper (read it here) does point to alternate versions of his rule. But Mr. Taylor says he never stood behind any alternatives to his original 1993 rule. Instead he says he was citing alternatives that others proposed, including the Fed. The 1993 version of the rule calls for a federal funds rate of around 1%, not close to zero as it is now. He charges Mr. Bernanke with misrepresenting his preferences.

“I did not propose or prefer an alternative rule in that 1999 paper, and it is hard to see how one could interpret the paper that way,” Mr. Taylor says in a blog post today.

If this were just two academics feuding over a formula, it wouldn’t be very interesting. But it’s more than that. Mr. Bernanke is the Fed chairman. Mr. Taylor is one of the most influential voices in monetary economics and he’s saying the Fed chairman is distorting his views to justify a controversial policy.

“It is important to correct the record because the ‘others have suggested’ rule has a much larger coefficient on the GDP gap and is therefore more likely to generate negative interest rates and be used to rationalize discretionary actions such as quantitative easing,” he says on his blog.

Here is a transcript of the full exchange between Mr. Bernanke and Sen. Toomey in Tuesday’s monetary policy hearing. Asked to justify the Fed’s plan to purchase $600 billion in Treasury bonds and to explain why it won’t cause inflation, Mr. Bernanke said the following:

MR. BERNANKE: I think that many of the monetary or nominal indicators that somebody like Milton Friedman would look at did suggest the need for a monetary stimulus. For example, nominal GDP has grown very slowly. Growth in the money supply is in fact — I’m not talking about the reserves held by banks which are basically idle — but if you look at M1 and M2, those have grown pretty slowly. The Taylor Rule suggests that we should be, in some sense, way below zero in our interest rate, and therefore we need some method other than just normal interest rate changes to —

SEN. TOOMEY: Do you know if Mr. Taylor believes that?

MR. BERNANKE: Well, there are different versions of the Taylor Rule, and there’s no particular reason to pick the one that he picked in 1993. In fact, he preferred a different one in 1999 which, if you use that one, gives you a much different answer. SEN. TOOMEY: My understanding is that his view of his own rule is that it would call for a higher Fed funds rate than what we have now.

MR. BERNANKE: There are, again, many ways of looking at that rule, and I think that ones that look at history, ones that are justified by modeling analysis, many of them suggest that we should be well below zero. And I just would disagree that that’s the only way to look at it. But anyway, so I think there are some — there is some basis for doing that.

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